Bridges Integrity Services LLP

Compliance rules are tough the world over and Singapore is no exception. But SME customers there have a proven answer to their compliance woes – GFI Archiver®. IT service provider Bridges Integrity Services LLP (BIS) helps its clients by offering GFI Software’s GFI Archiver, a software solution that securely stores and retrieves email; it can also archive files and calendars.

Mail archiving comes to compliance rescue in Singapore

BIS’ need for email safety was driven by its customers. “Our clients wanted an email auditing tool to track all incoming and outgoing emails for legal audit and compliance,” said Mr. Joke Jong, Project Manager/Tech Head for the company.

The old way of doing this just didn’t work. “We tried the manual way of making a copy of all emails. It worked in the beginning, but when email volume increased tremendously, the task became too large at hand,” Mr. Jong explained.

GFI Archiver® does more than just store old email.

“In the case of implementing GFI MailArchiver® (now GFI Archiver®) for our clients, we were able to track email utilization and generate reports for key stakeholders to assess employees’ email communications with client and vendors on whether it complies with the organization’s policies. Mail auditing has been proven a number of times to be very helpful to trace email communications where there were discrepancies, or when there was an issue of ‘accidental deletion of emails’ from a user’s mailbox,” Mr. Jong explained.

The GFI choice

Most companies evaluate a bunch of tools before picking one. In BIS’ case, that didn’t happen. “We didn't try any competing products because their price was not within the budget of small businesses,” Mr. Jong said.

“It is easy to implement and upgrade. Simple to use and the price is manageable for SMEs,” Mr. Jong said. BIS are happy with their choice and the product does exactly what it says on the box.

“It helps speed up backup and restore process when users accidentally delete items. Management of IT that pertains to user email issues are drastically reduced,” Mr. Jong said. The product also more than pays for itself; it also “helps reduce manpower cost, and eliminates possible carelessness and mistakes to the manual archiving methodology.”

“GFI licensing structure allows us to purchase only what we need in terms of the number of users’ mailboxes that require archiving,” Mr. Jong added.

IT and end users alike see the value in being able to store, track and retrieve email securely.

“We are able to track and go through the emails logged. Users can see their own archived emails without fear of not being able to retrieve them once emails were deleted.”

The bottom line? It takes little time to restore and track emails that end users report as missing. “GFI Archiver is able to efficiently address these issues.” He also feels safer knowing he can audit, and make sure all email is backed-up and trackable.

The GFI relationship

BIS has been around since 1999 and started using GFI software in 2009. The nine-employee strong company acts an outsourcer for the IT needs of clients with 5-300 employees – many of whom need to meet compliance regulations or archive email for security, convenience or just peace of mind.

“We encountered little downtime during setup and upgrade. The application simply works. There were times it broke because of the sheer load of emails that it was processing, but after fine-tuning the database configuration, operations became smooth,” Mr. Jong said. “Most importantly, there is sufficient documentations and accessibility for help, to guide us with the set-up, or when things go away.”

“We like GFI products because they are easy to implement/install, and easy to upgrade. The applications work as expected with minimal issues. When problems arose, it didn’t require a lot of customization or troubleshooting to the application or environment to fix the issue,” Mr. Jong said.

Concluding, he would also like to see more customization within the reports: “Customization of MailInsights is becoming more crucial as more SME business owners and managers are interested to see the reports of how their email systems are used by their employees.”

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